China

A Glimpse of China

  I traveled to China in 2009, the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. I found it to be an amazingly vital country, building and business going on everywhere. I realized that, despite intellectually understanding otherwise, I still had a sense of China and the Chinese people that was all about Mao: Great Leaps Forward, Cultural Revolution, Red Guards, everyone dressing the same in blue high collared tunic. They are so beyond that! The streets are full of people dressed like anywhere here, going about their business with energy and purpose. The traffic is intense and the city roadways are modern and impressive.

This was, as I anticipated, a very urban trip. The smallest city we were in, Guilin (“the Miami of China”) in south central China, was 600,00 people. The rest were 7, 13, 8, 17 million people. One city, Chongqing, was listed as having 32 million people and I could not imagine why we had never heard of it before. It turns out the municipal government “governs” 32 million people in an area 1/4 the size of California. The concentrated city itself was only(!) 7 million. This city reminded me a lot of Pittsburgh, very hilly and with two rivers coming together. Lots of bridges, few bicycles.

We went to many popular tourist sites and most of the tourists were Chinese. Places like the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Terracotta Warriors site in Xi’an, the Three Gorges Dam, are clearly very popular places with the Chinese.  And while there were lots of people at these places and in the city streets I never got that sense of being overwhelmed by a flood of people carrying me along, as I experienced in Tokyo many years ago.

We also went to places were there were no Chinese tourists, like a Hutong in Beijing. You may have read about these communities when many of them were being torn down in preparation for the 2008 Olympic games. They are blocks of pretty shabby, ill built courtyard houses where extended families live,  7 or 8 of them usually sharing one kitchen and one bathroom. They were as close to a slum as we saw and they are gradually being replaced with high rise apartment buildings, much to the displeasure of the people who live there, missing their sense of community. We were taken on an extended bicycle rickshaw ride through several of them and felt rather embarrassed, intruding as we were on peoples daily lives.

We went with a tour company called China Spree and there were 16 people in the group. They were all OK, no real crazies, pleasant enough as traveling companions but, of course, with some annoying habits – like complaining about the food. The food – surprise!- was Chinese, except for breakfast, and was not like American Chinese food. It was much more flavorful and varied in flavor. Some was very hot -spicy hot- but could be avoided. Oddly, dishes that we looked forward to, expecting to like, Peking Duck, e.g., turned out not to our liking, perhaps because of the oil used. Other dishes, like simple bok choy, were divine. Dumplings, not great; rice, delicious. We ate at restaurants most of the time (the exception being the 4 days on a cruise ship on the Yangtze River) and so the food was variable in quality, but, on the whole good. Dessert was invariably watermelon but the sweetest watermelon I’ve ever eaten and I didn’t tire of it. Except for breakfasts and on the boat, meals were served family style, at a round table for 8 with a big lazy Susan in the middle.

I stared telling you about the tour company to talk about the guides. We had one who stayed with us the entire trip and then, at each different city, a local guide. The national guide, Ron, was superb. His English was flawless, not only in grammar and vocabulary but in idioms, inflection, intonation. He was easy to listen to and very knowledgeable of Chinese history, politics and culture. He talked also about his own personal history and family and so he became a more authentic person to us. The local guides varied a lot and I often just let their spiel flow over me. These guides all take an English name when they begin to study the language, which is good for us because we had a hard time pronouncing the Chinese. Even the simplest phrases, like Thank You and Hello, were tough because of the required intonation.

It was a terrific trip that I wouldn’t have missed and it was exhausting. We were on the go from 8AM to 8PM with no break. We were so jet lagged on return that we took the best part of ten days to get ourselves righted.

More of my impressions and photos are here:

• One child policy
• Popular attractions
• Food and markets
• Salmagundi

A Note About the Three Gorges Dam

Planning for the Three Gorges Dam started in the early part of the 20th century, with a massive inventory that included not only land and buildings but every tree that would be flooded when the dam was built. The intention was to reimburse inhabitants for their losses. At that time the electricity generated was anticipated to supply nearly all of the country’s needs. When the dam was completed and fully functional, in 2012, China’s economy had grown so fast that it supplied then only 3% of the consumed electricity, probably less now.